


Kind of Poetic Though, Too

by zacharyissleepy



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Suicidal Thoughts, also this is a fluff free zone!!!! OOPS, so tw for that!!!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 02:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14345916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacharyissleepy/pseuds/zacharyissleepy
Summary: Hopefully, he thought as he dozed, Evan would find out before he had to get to that point.orThe first canon!day from Connor's point of view. Sorry I suck at titles and summaries but hopefully the quality of the writing will make up for that.





	Kind of Poetic Though, Too

     The time between when Connor stormed out of the computer lab was a blurred whirlwind of dissociation. Was he angry? Jealous? Hurt? Just the white light, so to speak, of the entire emotional color spectrum; all of them, blinding and overwhelming until he was somehow blindly, numbly crossing the street and slipping beyond the entrance to the park that he knew so well. The park – a short distance from his school – had a dense frame of trees around the back half of it, separating it from the residential property on the opposite side of the thick forestry, and at its front, nearest the entrance, could be seen a the sharp incline of a hill which led to a playground, a bridge that crossed a stream, and on the other side – nearest to the trees – swings. There was a particular tree, a tad beyond the swings, and just feet into the woodsy area where Connor found himself often when he wasn’t in school, or when he’d taken a night walk to reflect. Before he had time to think about where he was going, or what he was doing, there he was. He sat when he got there, beneath that tree; the leaves, an awning high above while a back slouched against the trunk of the tree, defeated; Evan’s letter still tucked away carefully in Connor’s pants pocket. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how he’d gotten there – five blocks down from the front entrance of his high school, and then a right turn that he had done a billion times before that day – it was just that, that day, he couldn’t have named one thing he passed on his way there, nor could he recall overhearing anything.

 

     He’d had a plan that day – to spend a final day exactly how he wanted before whispering goodnight to himself and testing whether or not the intangible part of his being was finite or not. He’d already smoked that morning, to dull his normally intense emotions to something that resembled normal. His plan, following that, was to eat until he reached the bottom of his stashed away junk food for when he got munchies while watching some of his favorite movies, and then – before Cynthia, or Larry, or even Zoe had a chance to return home, he would take pill after pill until that blinding white intensity of the entire emotional color spectrum faded into transparent nothing; not all encompassing darkness – just nothingness. Something about his mother’s persistence, though, complimented the mellowed out feeling that accompanied his high quite nicely and made it almost …contagious. In the long run, Cynthia’s faith in Connor would prove to be the final straw and his last undoing, because it had been the main component in him actually attending school, which he could only hope might be as satisfying to him as carrying out his haphazard plan would have been. Maybe, Connor’s herbally altered mind had whispered, much to the dismay of his mentally-ill brain, this year will be different from the others, maybe your mom’s there-was-a-reason, message-from-the-fucking-universe bullshit is proving itself yet again in intervening with your plan. That hadn’t been the case, of course.

 

     It was kind of poetic, though, too, because if anything, the same exact bullshit that he thought might have been promising, had worked in reverse, because Connor hadn’t stumbled upon anything worth abandoning his plan for, but rather, a million reasons why he should have put his own foot down harder than Cynthia had and just fucking gone with it from the beginning. The day had been pure hell from the moment he’d entered the school, until the moment he’d stormed out of the computer lab.

 

     The surge of hope, as stupid as he thought the hope was now had been enough to push Connor through getting ready and rushing down the stairs again to meet Zoe at her car before she could pull out of the driveway, and his high had him feeling like maybe he could keep the monster that was always lurking beneath the surface at bay, so that people could see the good in him, even just one fucking person. Before long, they were at the school and Zoe, the moment she entered the building, practically, was surrounded by her friend group – not that he really cared, they hadn’t been close in years, after all, but it would have been nice to be greeted by a friend group of his own. He walked past them to get to his locker just at the right moment to hear one of them make a snide remark about how he didn’t drive but Zoe did, and muttered a soft ‘fuck you’ under his breath that went unheard in the noisy halls of school on the first day after summer. He’d thought band kids were supposed to be the nice ones, as they were hardly above 'loser' status, but he brushed it off for the most part.

 

     He did make it to his locker, but before he had a chance to twist the lock to its proper combination, there was Kleinman, to make him realize that by showing up he was just opening himself up for more of the same old, banal bullshit that came with attending school and that nothing would be different, because nothing ever would be. “Hey, Connor, loving the new hair length – very school shooter chic,” the boy had spoken animatedly as his eyes scanned Connor. He remembered hearing about a billion times that the best way to deal with that kind of shit is not let it bother you. “I was kidding,” Jared had added, obviously trying to avoid the inevitable meltdown of batshit crazy Connor. “It was a joke.” He concluded, his tone as on-edge as it was sarcastic, still.

 

     “Yeah, no, it was funny, I’m laughing, can’t you tell?” Connor had tried, to joke back. “Am I not laughing hard enough for you?” he asked, his own tone sounding what he thought would be too lighthearted to sound threatening, even with his reputation. To no avail, of course, because his attempt at joking back had failed miserably; that being the first moment that he truly regretted showing up that day. He felt so stupid that he thought he could share light banter with someone, with KLEINMAN of all people, and that alone had put him on edge but what he’d perceived as laughter from Kleinman’s friend – that Hansen kid – he’d become unhinged.

     "What the fuck are you laughing at?" he'd demanded of the anxious boy who may as well have been a trembling chihuahua.

  
     "What?" Evan responded, seemingly genuinely taken aback by Connor's intense, emotional response to the situation.

  
     Connor, at that point, was in too deep to take a breather and analyze the situation, of course. "Stop fucking laughing at me," he shouted sharply as he approached Evan like a tiger about to pounce on its dinner.

  
     "I'm not--" Evan began, but before he could get all of his words out, or gather them in his mind, for that matter, Connor was speaking up again.

  
     "You think I'm a freak?" Connor asked, his tone sheer rage that he hoped would mask how deeply fucking Kleinman's words had affected him. Evan tried to defend himself, tried to explain what had really happened, but before he could, Connor had barked, "I'm not the freak, you're the fucking freak," hands extending and pressing to Evan's chest, shoving him down as he forced his way past like a raging tornado, ripping a tree's roots from the very ground they occupied.

  
     Connor regretted his actions almost immediately, as he played it out in his mind over and over again, analyzing each word, each motion, the way Evan tried to explain, the way he didn't listen... the way he essentially proved Jared's point instead of counteracting it somehow. Of course, Evan’s laughter hadn’t been a jab, but rather, a nervous exhale, which Connor would think about the entire day after having shoved him to the ground over it when he already had a fucking broken arm, his brain had equipped about a million times throughout the day.

     

     No wonder people thought he was a lunatic, his mind said all day, he's the kind of kid who pushes people for exhaling weirdly; the kind of kid who gives off a school shooter vibe evidently. If only Kleinman knew - if only anyone knew - Connor wasn't much of a threat to anyone but himself despite threats he may have once barked at the top of his lungs to his family. Connor's words had bite; a vicious bite; but a fear bite, like a dog snapping its jaw in self-defense preemptively. But those words, those taunts, the effortless cruelty with which they were delivered in such a way that he knew meant nothing to Jared all the while it meant everything to him, had ruined his day before it had even started and now there he was, ruminating on it throughout each of his classes rather than paying attention.

     

     Connor had always been a good student - he hadn't gotten to senior year without effort and intelligence, and he wasn't even really the kind of student who just barely skated by - he had decent grades. Somehow, this was a shock to many people - maybe because of all the days he skipped, or the fact that he dressed how he did, or the fact that it was no secret amongst his peers that he was stoned a good deal of the time. But all of that had never been enough to make school endurable, and it was getting less and less so as the hours passed on his first day of his senior year. When he wasn't thinking back to everything that had gone wrong that morning, he was thinking back to his plan - the original one, before he'd wound up coming to school, before he thought just _maybe_...

 

     Now he was thinking, fuck 'just maybe'.

 

     Once he was in English, a bit of his hope had returned - it was a subject he enjoyed, and kind of a pleasant enough way to polish off an otherwise shitty day. It had left him in such a mood that when he ran into Zoe after school and she asked him to wait around in the computer lab or something while the jazz band practiced, he was in a decent enough mood to not lash out at her; not even when she scolded him for his treatment of Evan Hansen. He'd been feeling shitty about it the entire day so he nodded to appease her as she spoke and then headed off to the computer lab where, coincidentally, Evan was located. At first, Connor kept a low profile, just logging onto one of the computers and doing nothing of importance on tumblr - until the printer sputtered to life and began spitting out a page with a mechanical buzz that ended as quickly as it had begun.

 

     One of Connor's eyebrows perked curiously as no one rushed in to claim the page as people most usually did when they printed things to the school printer. He stood, tentatively approaching the machine, waiting for a moment to see if something else might come out of it, and that whoever was printing - presumably Evan - might appear to claim them but after a beat of nothing else, he gathered the page which had Evan's name right on it. Maybe he could make things right, he thought, without doing so in such a manner that he was quite obviously vulnerable. He hoped. He took the page and neared Evan with some caution, not wanting to freak him out right off the bat - after all, he'd shoved him to the ground earlier in the day.

 

     "So, uh," Connor tucked the page beneath one arm while pointing in Evan's direction with the other as he stepped closer, "What happened to your arm?" he finished, now standing before the shorter boy, the arm he'd pointed with crossed over his chest now.

  
     "Oh, I um," Evan paused, swallowed, and carried on, "I fell out of a tree, actually," he explained.

  
     A part of Connor wanted to draw the parallel between Evan and Cedric Diggory, in Harry Potter, when he descended from within a tree; he kept it to himself, laughing instead because, well, how many times in your life are you told someone broke their arm falling out of a tree? "You fell out of a tree?" He looked down at the ground between them, then back up to Evan's face, the subtlest hint of a smile curling one corner of his lips up as he finished, "That is just the saddest fucking thing I've ever heard, oh my god." There wasn't harsh judgment in his tone, just lighthearted gest to contrast his behavior earlier in the day. A quiet laugh accompanied his words, and a halfhearted attempt at a laugh from Evan accompanied his own laugh, Connor noticed.

  
     "I know," he concurred, all the while, Connor was eyeing his cast; plain, white plaster that had yet to meet the fine tip of a sharpie.

  
     "No one's signed your cast," Connor noted. Other kids might've asked him if he wanted to at that point, or maybe found a way to turn the observation around on him and use it to ridicule but not Evan, he just took a glance down at his own, broken arm and agreed again.

  
     "No, I know," he said, all the while avoiding Connor's gaze.

  
     "I'll sign it," Connor offered. He wouldn't have normally done it, but there was something that struck him about Evan; a mutual loneliness, a shared societal condemnation whre they had both been deemed something or other by people who knew little to nothing about them. They shared an unspoken kinship based on lacking a social circle. It went deeper than that, too, Connor thought as Evan shook his head and responded:

 

     "Oh, um," hesitating and fidgeting slightly. "...you don't have to," instead of shoving the cast over to be signed.

 

     It was too vulnerable to say 'I want to,' so Connor just took a step closer to Evan and asked, "Do you have a sharpie?" which Evan then reached into his pants pocket to retrieve, handing it over to Connor. Maybe this was the day, turning around, everything that had gone wrong resolving itself. Connor took the sharpie and placed the lid between his lips while he grabbed Evan's arm, hardly even pausing for a moment when Evan murmured a protest of pain. Something about that alabaster plaster called to him and he scrawled his name as large as he could all the way across one side of Evan's cast which Evan didn't seem particularly thrilled by but also didn't openly say he hated.

  
     "Oh, great, thanks," he said as Connor handed the sharpie back.

  
     "Now we can both pretend that we have friends," Connor said in a tone that was stiff yet rigid, like a stone's edge - unbreakable, but worn over time. Despite the fear that he might come off as vulnerable and the way that everything about his self-presentation alienated him, there was still that quiet whisper in his mind that said maybe they wouldn't always have to pretend.

  
     "Good point," Evan said, turning to leave, which reminded Connor of the initial reason he'd approached Evan to begin with - the paper. He'd hardly even looked at it, only noticing the name, so as Evan was turning he held it out. He would deny it if he was prompted, but there was also something within him that just didn't want their conversation to end just yet.

  
     "Is this yours?" he asked abruptly, stopping Evan in his tracks and"I found it on the printer. It's - 'Dear Evan Hansen,'" he explained, "That's your name, right?"

  
     Evan visibly tensed, now, looking less like a trembling chihuahua and more like a wide-eyed, taxidermied one. "Oh, that's just a stupid. It's a paper. I had to write it for, um, an assignment," he explained frantically, which prompted Connor to scan over it with his eyes a bit more.

  
     "Because there's Zoe..." Connor read aloud, looking up from the sheet and to Evan's petrified facial expression as he asked, "Is this about my sister?" ever inclination to become paranoid going off within his mind all at once as he considered what reasons Evan might have for writing such a thing.

  
     "No, not at all," Evan tried to lie but Connor's mind had already taken the small amount of information it had and ran with it until it had twisted things into an ugly, cruel scenario that felt real in a matter of moments.

  
     "You wrote this because you knew that I would find it," Connor said, sounding a lot more sure than he felt. He did that sometimes, said his thoughts out loud to consider if they sounded crazy.

  
     "What?" Evan asked, the way that he didn't immediately deny the accusation solidifying it as fact in Connor's warped sense of reality given undiagnosed mental illness. Of course, this was all despite the fact that he would have thought Evan was lying if he'd denied too readily as well.

  
     "Yeah," he began, taking another glance over the letter. "You saw that I was the only other person in the computer lab so you wrote this, and you printed it out so that I would find it--" he continued. In truth, it wouldn't be the first time he was set up to explode, provoked by peers and as far-fetched as the scenario sounded, he'd already accepted the delusion.

  
     "Why would I do that?" the shorter boy asked, bewildered and nervous about what would happen next, what might be said. This put Connor more on edge, he hated it when people were nervous about his behavior even when he was giving them every reason to feel that way. It made him feel crazy and out of control and so vastly separated from a recovery of any sort.

  
     "So I would read some creepy shit you wrote about my sister and freak out, right?" he interrupted, not waiting for a response before adding, "And then you can tell everyone that I'm crazy, right?" His tone was sharp and furious; a massive beast to shield the child who was weak, fulnerable, and fearful of rejection that resided within Connor; that was Connor's driving force, even at his worst, most aggressive moments.

  
     "No, wait, I don't even--," Evan obviously wanted this to end, and now, Connor did, too. Connor felt stupid for ever even entertaining the idea of the two of them as friends. "What?" Evan asked. He was probably trying to follow Connor's fast moving train of thought, but Connor's train of thought had already derailed and was heading for a catastrophic collision, causing him to interpret Evan's confusion as an attempt to backtrack and save himself with a lie.

  
     "Fuck you," Connor spat, racing past Evan and out of the computer lab, out of the school, down the street. He didn't consider that Zoe might be confused or worried when she was done practicing, he didn't consider anything, he just considered his anger. He didn't even stop to read the letter in its entirety, just raced in the direction of serenity and seclusion; the park; a rapidly moving, severe storm on a path of destruction, a bright white light of every part of the emotional color spectrum, oblivion, fear, and pain until he finally was underneath the tree, catching his breath and organizing his thoughts.

  
     He pulled the letter that he had since storming out tucked into his pocket and unfolded the neat square, surveying the words on it. _Dear Evan Hansen, Turns out this wasn’t an amazing day after all. This isn’t going to be an amazing week or an amazing year, because why would it be?_ Connor lowered the paper to his lap for a moment, considering that this had been precisely what he'd felt that morning, prior to going to school. His mother had someone instilled within him some idiotic hope, he thought, which had been an illusion that was shattered early on in the day. However, as hope often was, it was persistent, and he'd held onto it until he had been given reason, after reason, after reason not to. And someone else felt like that, too. Evan felt like that, too.

  
     He thought back to how he'd felt in the computer lab, before they'd - parted ways - so to speak; Like they were on level playing ground, like they somehow understood one another. He had been staring into the face of an emotional mirror.

  
     He read on -

  
    _I know, because there’s Zoe, and all my hope is pinned on Zoe, who I don’t even know, and doesn’t know me. Maybe if I could just talk to her --_

  
 He considered that he had grown, even if in a rathr short time, to view Evan similarly to how Evan seemed to view Zoe; as someone who might make things better. This was when he fully accepted that Evan's intention had never been to make him look crazy, as he read those words. Evan looked at Zoe and saw hope, just like Connor had looked at Evan and seen the very same.

  
      _Maybe nothing would be different at all. I wish everything was different._  
_I wish I was part of something. I wish that anything I said mattered to anyone. I mean face it, would anyone notice if I just disappeared tomorrow?_

_Sincerely,_

_Your most best, and dearest friend, Me_

  
     As he read the words to himself in his quiet little hiding spot, he came to another instance of feeling everything all at once. He was angry at himself for misinterpreting, and angry that he was not alone in his loneliness and yet not good enough by Evan's standards to entertain the idea of becoming friends with. He was hurt and angry that everyone idealized Zoe as this perfect human being, and that he couldn't be close with her like they had been as kids anymore.  
Most of all, as he read over the letter a second time he was angry because he knew that Evan was right, that no one would notice if he disappeared tomorrow and... what did that mean for Connor. Evan was barely even on anyone's radar, but Connor? People hated Connor. Like Evan, who thought he wasn't good enough to be friends with, and Kleinman, who thought he would probably shoot up the school. His dad, who just thought he wanted attention. His mom, who thought maybe he'd act less crazy if they cut gluten out of all their diets, or did yoga, or meditated, or whatever. Zoe - whose hatred he deserved, but wished he didn't. He had been so terrible to her out of resentment, because he saw exactly what Evan saw in her; he saw how easy it was for her. Zoe had friends, and was likable, and knew how to talk to people. Nobody walked on eggshells around Zoe, they knew they didn't have to.

  
     People would be happy if Connor disappeared tomorrow, he thought.

  
     And Evan would find that out, too, and Connor felt bad that he couldn't do anything about it because he wasn't the person that Evan wanted, so he wasn't the person that would be able to give him the realization that nothing would change and nothing would get better; he needed Zoe for that. Just like Connor had needed Evan for that.

  
     He had started the day with the intention of finding hope in the cruel, chaotic universe and instead he had found a million reasons to do just what he had planned on doing before; it felt almost like a game of tug-of-war in which he was on one side of the rope and his family, and Evan, and Kleinman, and Zoe's friends, hell, the entire student body stood opposing him giving the rope gentle tugs every so often until the final tug had pulled him beyond the edge of a cliff.  
He refolded the note, replaced it in his pocket, and fished a plastic ziplock bag out of his messenger bag, that he had taken to school so that his parents could not stumble upon it in his room. The bag had a variety of pills, things he'd snuck out of the medicine cabinet, things he'd bought from sketchy sources. Next, he took a partial bottle of water out of his bag and took as many of the pills as he could stomach at a time, using the water as sparingly as he could so that he wouldn't run out until everything went hazy and numb, and then, eventually, dark.

  
     Hopefully, he thought as he dozed, Evan would find out before he had to get to that point.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I have never written a fic that wasn't just silly and reserve my writing passion mostly for roleplay, so comments and constructive criticism are more than welcome.
> 
> Also, uh, if you for any reason want to follow my tumblr go ahead! http://john-sadams.tumblr.com


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